亚洲中产阶级之崛起

周原研（音译）正逐步晋身中产阶级——她“每一步前进一环路”。18岁从内蒙古来到北京时，她住在六环的一个村子里，坐一个半小时公交车去上班。她最早当服务员，但不久就转行干起售楼工作。

“这三年里我的佣金收入增加了不少，所以我们能够前进‘两环’，”在谈到自己已搬到四环——最终要搬到三环——的进步时，她的脸上闪过一丝骄傲。

周原研今年22岁，和妈妈一起住在距北京市中心40分钟路程的一套小公寓里。她每月收入在3000元至6000元人民币（合455至910美元）之间，具体数字取决于所得佣金。按照波士顿咨询集团(Boston Consulting Group)采用的定义，周原研已经处于中产阶级的边缘。她妈妈作清洁工，月工资为1500元人民币。母女俩的月房租是2000元人民币，这样，一个月能存下约1800元人民币。

周原研觉得可以稍微放纵一下自己。新买的联想(Lenovo)智能手机乐Phone让她爱不释手。她的大部分闲暇时间都用来在网上聊天、玩网络游戏，以及在网上购物——这是亚洲新兴中产阶级的另一个特征。她梦想买一套房子，但从不幻想有朝一日能够买得起她在北京卖的那些房子。北京如今的房价和华盛顿不相上下。她说：“像那些房子，我攒上一年的钱才够买一平米。”

即便如此，周原研和千千万万个与她有着类似经历的人物质生活稳步改善的故事，也可以证明一点：长期以来人们隐约感觉到的中国中产阶级是真实存在的。不久以前，对于中国——或者亚洲其它任何一个新兴经济体——能有一个规模可观的消费阶层从社会金字塔底层的穷苦大众中破茧而出，许多经济学家还公开表示怀疑。但如今，这种怀疑正开始消散。

今年，有关亚洲发展要依靠出口拉动的说法可能开始偃旗息鼓，人们会认识到，亚洲未来的增长在很大程度上将依靠内力。由亚洲出口主导型发展模式所致的全球失衡甚至可因此得到纠正。全球失衡是引发本轮全球金融危机的核心因素。

不只是在中国，在世界第二人口大国印度，在有2.4亿人口、经济快速增长的印尼，以及在有8500万人口、正追随中国发展脚步的越南，消费阶层都开始发展壮大。即使是在不那么成功的经济体，比如拥有近9500万人口的菲律宾，虽然经济增速没有达到一流水平，但由于多年来经济一直在稳步增长，生活富足的群体也在逐渐扩大。

在日本、韩国、台湾、新加坡和香港等繁华之地以外的亚洲地区，中产阶级正在兴起，这将带来深远的影响。鉴于未来几年欧洲经济乃至美国经济都可能增长乏力，从食品到保险等各个行业都渴望出现新的消费者。许多企业可能在亚洲找到它们亟需的机会。

经济咨询机构龙洲经讯(Dragonomics)的葛艺豪(Arthur Kroeber)在2006年发表了一份报告，向中国中产阶级规模堪比美国的“童话”大泼冷水。他当时估计，中国只有20%的城市家庭——即13亿人口中的1.1亿人——拥有较强的可支配购买力。大部分中国人属于葛艺豪所称的“勉强糊口的中国”(surviving China)，即那些居住在上海、北京和珠三角等“富岛”以外地区、在贫困中勉强糊口度日的广大群众。

但葛艺豪等人如今已经改变了观点。许多中国人的收入比预期更快达到了一个“门槛”——它是标志消费开始腾飞的一个难以确定的临界点。而且，葛艺豪表示，中国人真实的收入水平（现金收入或灰色收入）高于官方统计数字，这个久已有之的假设在近期的研究中得到了印证。龙洲经讯如今估计，中国有3亿人——占总人口的23%——拥有较强的可支配购买力，他们居住在大型企业容易进入的较大城市。假如这3亿人——他们属于龙洲经讯所称的“消费的中国”(consuming China)——自成一个国家，该国的经济规模将相当于德国的三分之二。

另一家咨询机构麦肯锡(McKinsey)预计，到2025年，中国城市家庭将从当前的1.9亿户增加到3.72亿户，而中产阶级在其中所占的比例将从29%上升到75%。麦肯锡大中华区消费产品业务部主管马克斯•马格尼(Max Magni)表示：“中产阶级的上层是这样一群人，他们正准备购买一套小型寓所，有一辆汽车，更多地考虑休闲活动。”次一层的人群“开始住进公寓楼，所以他们开始关心别人会怎么看他们，并相应地进行消费”。中产阶级下层则是那些刚刚有能力购买基本生活必需品以外用品的人群。

亚洲中产阶级的崛起当然不限于中国。麦肯锡零售业专家伊林娜•维塔尔(Ireena Vittal)表示，印度的12亿人口大致可分为2.5亿户家庭。其中的1亿家庭生活贫困，基本上没有晋身中产阶级的现实希望。此外，只有200万家庭的生活水准与美欧富人相当。维塔尔表示，从零售业角度来看，让人感兴趣的是中间阶层。印度年收入在7000至1万美元的家庭有1400万至1500万户——5年内有望大幅增加到4000万户，相当于2亿人口。

维塔尔表示，当前的印度和2001年时的中国差不多。“经过20年的全面增长，收入分布的正态曲线整体右移。”

她表示，这些家庭在食品上的花销只占收入的一小部分，他们把钱更多地花在住房、私人教育、医疗、摩托车、厨房设备、空调和衣服上。麦肯锡估计，即使印度经济以年均7.3%的速度增长（低于目前8.5%的增速），到2025年，印度中产阶级也将达到5.8亿人。

印度消费者恣意挥霍的时代尚未到来。木匠的女儿柴特拉•曼朱纳特(Chaitra Manjunath)就是个典型例子。曼朱纳特今年26岁，在家乡希莫加（Shimoga，离班加罗尔不远）的一家外资后勤外包公司找了份薪酬不错的工作。但她正在攻读MBA课程，学费是20万卢比（合4418美元），她70%的薪水都花在了学费上。她偶尔会买点“奢侈品”，比如衣料。其余的可支配收入就用来购买黄金、保险和股票，这和大部分印度人一样。印度是个高储蓄率国家。

如果说进步就代表着去首都机场要经历3个小时前车挨后车的交通堵塞，那么印尼也在进步。在过去10年里，行驶在印尼常常不太完善道路上的汽车增加了近3倍，从300万辆增加到至少1130万辆。“现在汽车太多了，”25岁的阿曼达•颂皮(Amanda Sompi)说道。她在雅加达一家IT公司工作。“10年前还没这么多车，但现在有太多的人来到雅加达。”

颂皮眼下或许还买不起车。但她同样是在短短时间内就在职场上出人头地。她最早在星巴克(Starbucks)打工，月薪是200万印尼盾（合225美元），后来跳到一家广告公司，月薪涨到310万印尼盾，如今她在一家IT公司当活动经理，月薪540万印尼盾。“我可以支付自己的生活费，还可以给我妹妹出点学费，”她微笑着说。“我刚刚成为一个独立的女人。”市场研究机构欧睿(Euromonitor)预计，到2020年，印尼年可支配收入在5000至1.5万美元的家庭，所占的比例将从当前的36%升至58%左右。

亚洲三大发展中经济体均出现了一种新现象：一个消费阶层正在大城市以外的地区兴起。“在中国的小城市，中产阶级及其消费的增长将远远快于迄今外资企业扎堆的大城市，”波士顿咨询集团合伙人廖天舒(Carol Liao)表示。她补充说，北京、上海和广州的房价正开始挤压人们的收入。该公司预计，在人口不到100万的城市，中产阶级的成长速度将是其它城市的两倍。

印度新兴中产阶级也并非局限在新德里、孟买、班加罗尔和海得拉巴。得益于教育质量改善、地价飙升、以及经济繁荣所创造的服务业和制造业就业机会，在卢迪亚纳、昌迪加尔、浦那、哥印拜陀、奥兰加巴德和苏拉特等无数中小城市，人们的生活也越来越富足。曼朱纳特所在的希莫加距班加罗尔300公里，是一个为班加罗尔供应物资的城市，同时也是印度IT及外包革命的中心。就算是在这样的城市，耐克(Nike)、阿迪达斯(Adidas)、李维斯(Levi Strauss)以及印度本土的Peter England等品牌也开始现身市场。

在西方企业的董事会会议室里，一提到“中产阶级”，的确很容易让人联想起美国式郊区生活和消费模式这种不切实际的画面。以这种标准衡量，亚洲新兴中产阶级的规模仍然相对较小。年收入为7500美元的人在中国或印尼或许会过得很舒坦，但在美国就会被认为处于贫困线以下。美国总体家庭收入的中值接近5万美元。印度的纳税人口只有3000万人，这既说明印度有钱人为数不多，也体现出税制体系的低效。

尽管如此，亚洲许多发展中国家似乎都已达到了一个临界点。如果各家咨询机构的预测靠谱的话，亚洲中产阶级的发展必将带来巨大的经济和商业影响，更不消说环境影响了。新兴的消费阶层将对世界资源构成进一步压力。野村证券(Nomura)预计，到2014年，中国的零售额可能超过美国。

虽然“勉强糊口的中国”将贡献其中一部分消费（大型跨国企业很难从这部分消费中捞到多少好处），但有相当大一部分消费将来自刚成气候、抱负远大的中产阶级。中国的汽车和手机购买量已经超过美国——不久将轮到电脑——原因就在这里。亚洲中产阶级目前还不具备拉动全球经济的力量，但是，他们很快就可以为亚洲自身的增长提供比目前大得多的动力。

Zhou Yuanyan is becoming middle class – one ring road at  a time. When she moved to  Beijing as an 18-year-old from Inner Mongolia, she lived in a village on the capital’s sixth ring road, an hour and a half by bus to work. After starting out as a waitress she quickly switched to selling property.

“I increased my commission income quite a bit over the past three years, so we were able to move twice,” she says with a flash of pride, charting her progress to the fourth ring road and, eventually, the third.

Now 22, Ms Zhou lives with her mother in a small apartment about 40 minutes from the city centre. She makes between Rmb3,000 and Rmb6,000 a month ($455-$910), depending on commission, which puts her on the cusp of the middle class, according to a definition used by Boston Consulting Group. Her mother makes Rmb1,500 in a cleaning job. They spend Rmb2,000 on rent and save about Rmb1,800 a month.

Ms Zhou feels able to indulge herself a little. She is glued to her new LePhone, a smartphone made by China’s Lenovo, and spends much of her free time chatting online, playing online games and – another feature of Asia’s emerging middle class – shopping online. She dreams of buying a flat but harbours no illusions of being able to afford one like those she sells in Beijing, where house prices are now comparable with those of Washington. “I would have to save about a year to buy just one square metre in an apartment like that,” she says.

Even so, the story of steady material progress that she and tens of millions like her can tell gives credence to the long elusive dream of a Chinese middle class. Until recently, many economists were openly sceptical about the idea that China, or any other emerging Asian economy, could spirit a sizeable consuming class from the mass of poverty at the base of the social pyramid. But that scepticism is beginning to fade.

This year could be the one when talk of Asia’s export-led development begins to give way to a realisation that much of the region’s future growth will be self-generated. That could even begin to address the global imbalances resulting from Asia’s export-led model that have been at the heart of the global financial crisis.

Not only in China but in countries including India, the world’s second most populous; Indonesia, a fast-growing nation of 240m; and Vietnam, 85m-strong and following in China’s developmental footsteps, the consuming class is beginning to grow. Even in less obviously successful economies such as the Philippines, which has a population of nearly 95m, years of steady if sub-optimal growth are creating pockets of broader affluence.

The emergence of a middle class in Asia beyond the prosperity that already exists in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong will have far-reaching consequences. With growth likely to be anaemic in Europe and possibly America for many years to come, businesses from food to insurance are desperate for new consumers with money to spend. Many may find the opportunity they need in Asia.

In 2006, Arthur Kroeber of Dragonomics, an economic consultancy, put out a report in which he poured cold water on the “fairy tale” of a Chinese middle class on anything like an American scale. He estimated that a mere 20 per cent of urban Chinese households – 110m people in a country of 1.3bn – had significant discretionary spending power. The bulk of Chinese belonged to what Mr Kroeber called “surviving China”, a vast mass of poverty and subsistence outside the affluent islands of Shanghai, Beijing and the Pearl River delta.

But Mr Kroeber is among those to have changed his mind. More quickly than expected, many Chinese have reached a “threshold level” of income, an unpredictable point at which consumption takes off. Furthermore, he says, the real level of Chinese income, held in cash or hidden from view, is higher than captured in official statistics, a long-held assumption corroborated by recent research. Dragonomics now estimates 300m people – 23 per cent of the population – have significant discretionary spending and live in cities large enough to be accessible by big companies. If those 300m, who belong to what Dragonomics calls “consuming China”, were a nation, they would live in an economy two-thirds the size of Germany’s.

McKinsey, another consultancy, expects the middle class to expand from 29 per cent of China’s 190m urban households now to 75 per cent of 372m urban households in 2025. “The upper middle class are the ones that are ready to buy a small apartment, that have a car, that think about leisure activities more,” says Max Magni, head of the consumer products practice in Greater China. Those in the band below are “starting to live in buildings with multiple apartments, so they start to care about what other people think about them and spend accordingly”, he says. The lower middle class are those recently able to afford more than the bare necessities.

T?he emergence of an Asian middle class is certainly not limited to China. Ireena Vittal, a retail specialist at Mc-Kinsey, says India’s 1.2bn people can be divided into roughly 250m households. Of those, 100m live in poverty and have little realistic prospect of attaining middle-class status. Just 2m households enjoy the same standard of living as rich counterparts in the US or Europe. The interesting segment from a retail standpoint is the next level down, she says. There are 14m-15m households with an annual income of $7,000-$10,000 – a number set to explode to 40m households, or 200m people, within five years.

India is like China in 2001, says Ms Vittal. “After two decades of systemic growth, the whole bell curve of income distribution moves to the right.”

These households spend a lower proportion of income on food, devoting more to housing, private education, healthcare, motorcycles, kitchen fittings, air conditioners and clothes, she says. Even if India’s economy grows at an annual 7.3 per cent – below the current 8.5 per cent – Mc-Kinsey reckons that by 2025 it would have a middle class of 580m people.

The era of the free-spending Indian consumer is not here quite yet. Chaitra Manjunath, the 26-year-old daughter of a carpenter, is typical. Although she has found a relatively well-paid job at a foreign back-office outsourcing company in her home town of Shimoga, near Bangalore, 70 per cent of her salary goes to repay the Rs200,000 ($4,418) she spent on an MBA programme. With the rest, she buys an occasional “luxury”, such as dress material. The rest of her disposable income – like that of many in high-savings India – goes on gold, insurance and shares.

If progress is a three-hour, bumper-to-bumper traffic jam to the capital’s airport, Indonesia too is going places. Over the past decade the number of vehicles on Indonesia’s often inadequate roads has nearly quadrupled from 3m to at least 11.3m. “There are so many cars now,” says 25-year-old Amanda Sompi, who works for a Jakarta-based information technology company. “Ten years ago there weren’t so many, but so many people have moved to Jakarta.”

Ms Sompi may not be able to afford a car of her own just yet. But she too has worked her way up in a short time from Starbucks, where she was paid Rp2m ($225) a month, to an advertising agency paying her Rp3.1m and to her present job as an event manager at an IT company, earning Rp5.4m. “I can pay for myself and give a bit for my little sister’s education,” she beams. “I just became an independent woman.” Euromonitor, a market research group, expects the number of Indonesian households with annual disposable income of $5,000-$15,000 to rise from 36 per cent today to about 58 per cent in 2020.

Asia’s three biggest developing economies are all now witnessing something new: the  emergence of a consuming class outside the biggest conurbations. “The growth of the middle class and its spending will be much faster in small-town China than in the biggest cities many foreign companies have concentrated on so far,” says Carol Liao, a partner at BCG. Property prices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are starting to squeeze people’s income, she adds. BCG expects the middle class in cities with a population below 1m to grow twice as fast as in other cities.

Neither is India’s emerging middle class confined to New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Numerous smaller cities – places including Ludhiana, Chandigarh, Pune, Coimbatore, Aurangabad and Surat – are experiencing growing affluence thanks to better education, sharply increased land values, and the service and manufacturing jobs created by India’s economic boom. Shimoga, where Ms Manjunath lives, is a feeder city to Bangalore, 300km away and the centre of India’s IT and outsourcing revolution. Even there, brands such as Nike, Adidas, Levi Strauss and the local Peter England have started to appear.

To be sure, in the boardrooms of western companies, “middle class” tends to conjure up unrealistic images of American suburban life and consumption patterns. By this measure, emerging Asia’s middle class remains relatively small. Someone with an annual income of $7,500 may be able to live fairly comfortably in China or Indonesia but would be considered below the poverty line in the US, where gross median household income is nearly $50,000. In India just 30m people pay taxes, an indication of the limited number of well-off Indians as well as the inefficiency of the tax system.

Still, much of developing Asia seems to have reached a tipping point. If the projections of consultants are anything like accurate, the growth of the region’s middle class will have enormous economic and commercial implications, not to mention environmental ones as a new consumer class puts further strain on the world’s resources. Nomura reckons that by 2014, retail sales in China may surpass those of the US.

While much of that consumption will be in “surviving China” – and thus of limited interest to big multinationals – a substantial part will be driven by a newly empowered and aspirational middle class. That is why the Chinese already purchase more cars and mobile phones than Americans and will soon buy more computers too. The Asian middle class is not quite yet in a position to power the global economy. But the day is fast approaching when it will drive a much greater share of Asia’s own.